Hitler (46 page)

If we wish to create a power factor, we need unity, authority, and drill. Our purpose must be not to create an army of politicians but an army of soldiers of the new philosophy.

Adolf Hitler, 1925

 

Hitler's position would seem to be on the verge of crumbling. He had come back from Landsberg with a certain messianic aura. This had given a degree of sanction to his strange behavior, to his insults, rifts and splitting maneuvers. But after a year that aura had worn off, and it was clear that the party could not survive any more such purges. To regain his lost ground, Hitler would have to smash the opposition while capturing its members for himself. He would have to make the North Germans renounce their socialistic tendencies and abjure their catastrophe policy. He would have to unseat Gregor Strasser, while swinging him around to his own side again, and somehow reconcile him to the plebeian Munich coterie of Streichers, Essers, and Amanns. Hitler's tactical agility, his artistry in handling people, his hypnotic talent, were seldom better revealed than in the way he went about this.

The question of the expropriated property of the princely houses served him as his lever. For the referendum proposed by the socialist parties had aroused a storm throughout the nation, and driven a wedge through fronts and political factions. Working class and middle class alike, the small savers and small property holders, even the most trusty of party members, realized with spontaneous indignation that any reimbursement for the princely families would come out of their own pockets. Yet they could not bear the thought of striking up an alliance with the Marxists against the former rulers of the country and by sanctioning the expropriation partially sanctioning the outrage of the revolution. Caught in this intellectual and emotional dilemma, the people spent themselves in furious argument. In Hanover, too, the matter was passionately debated.

Hitler saw how he could turn this situation to his own advantage. He called a meeting of the leaders of the entire party to be held in Bamberg on February 14, 1926. Bamberg was one of the bailiwicks of Julius Streicher, a fanatical Hitler devotee, and Hitler had recently honored the local party group by participating in their Christmas celebrations. Hitler saw to it that the North German district leaders with their mainly modest organizations would be impressed and possibly also somewhat demoralized by the display of banners, giant posters, and the announcement of massive demonstrations. By giving very short notice and by manipulating the list of participants, he took care that his own following would have a distinct majority. Hitler himself opened the discussion, which went on for the whole day, in a speech lasting nearly five hours. He called the proponents of expropriation deceitful because they spared the property of the Jewish lords of banking and the stock exchange. To be sure, the former rulers should not receive anything they had no right to; nevertheless, what did belong to them should not be taken from them: the National Socialist Party stood for private property and justice. As his South German followers applauded these sentiments, and were joined gradually and hesitantly by a few of the North Germans, he began to tear into the program of the Strasser group, point by point, opposing to it the party program of 1920: this was “the Founding Charter of our religion, our philosophy. To deviate from it would imply a betrayal of those who died for their faith in our ideas.” A diary entry by Goebbels reflects the feelings of dismay on the part of the North German rebels: “I feel stunned. What is Hitler? A reactionary? Incredibly clumsy and insecure. Russian question: completely beside the point. Italy and England our natural allies: Horrible! Our task is smashing Bolshevism. Bolshevism is a Jewish plot! We must inherit Russia! 180 million people!!! Pay off the princes!... Horrible! Program suffices. Content with it. Feder nods. Ley nods. Streicher nods. Esser nods. It hurts my soul when I see you in this company! Brief discussion. Strasser speaks. Falteringly, tremblingly, clumsily, good, honest Strasser. Oh God, how ill-equipped we are for coping with those swine down there.... I cannot say a word! I feel dumbfounded.”
³⁰

Even so, Strasser would not recant. He persisted in calling anti-Bolshevism totally misguided, a prime example of the way the capitalist system sowed confusion among its enemies and tricked the nationalist forces into serving its exploitative interests. Nevertheless, Strasser's defeat was complete. His brother Otto Strasser, to gloss over the humiliation, later pointed out that Hitler had cunningly convoked the meeting for a weekday, thus ensuring the absence of the unpaid North German gauleiters, who had jobs in addition to their party functions. Only Gregor Strasser and Goebbels had been in Bamberg, Otto Strasser alleged.

In fact, February 14, 1926, was a Sunday, and almost all the principal spokesmen of the Strasser coterie were present: Hinrich Lohse of Schleswig-Holstein, Theodor Vahlen of Pomerania, Rust of Hanover, Klant of Hamburg. None of them, however, stood up to defend the idea of leftist National Socialism. In embarrassment they looked to Joseph Goebbels, the one man in their ranks with a natural gift for oratory; and like him, they felt stunned. Goebbels was cowed by Hitler's magnetic powers, by his brilliantly staged arrival complete with a column of cars, by the organizational ability and display of wealth of the Munich group. Gregor Strasser also succumbed, for the moment at least, to Hitler's talent for seduction. Thus Hitler had just finished fulminating against the “company of traitors” when he suddenly and demonstratively went over to Strasser and put his arm around his shoulders. Although the gesture did not convert Strasser himself, it made an impression upon the leaders at the meeting and forced them to take a conciliatory attitude. The working committee of North and West German gauleiters was in practice dissolved, its draft program not even put up for discussion, and the party took its stand against expropriation of the princely houses. Three weeks later, on March 5, Gregor Strasser sent out a hectographed circular letter to his fellow party leaders asking them to return the draft program “for very particular reasons” and because he had “promised Herr Hitler” that he would “see to the rounding up of every last copy of the draft.”

It would seem that Hitler's vigorous intervention was directed not so much against the leftist program as against the leftist mentality of the Strasser following. Goebbels had even imagined, shortly before the Bamberg meeting, that “Hitler could be coaxed over to our terrain.” But, in fact, what incensed Hitler most was the kind of Nazi the Strasser brothers were fostering: a National Socialist perpetually engaged in discussions, involved in problems, prone to doubt and needing to square things intellectually. To Hitler's mind, this was a deadly peril to the movement, bringing back the sort of sectarian dissension that had ruined the nationalist movement in the past. For Hitler equated all argument over ideas with sectarianism. Much as he favored and sometimes promoted personal conflicts among his followers, he hated theoretical differences of opinion. These, he thought, merely consumed energies and diminished the force of the movement. One of the secrets of Christianity's success, he was always saying, was the unalterability of its dogmas. Hitler's “Catholic” streak seldom emerges so clearly as in his respect for rigid, immutable formulas. All that really matters is a political creed, he would say; “that is what the whole world revolves around.” And he would add that “no matter how idiotic” a program was, “people will believe in it because of the firmness with which it is advocated.” In fact, a few weeks later Hitler took occasion to declare the old party program, in spite of its obvious weaknesses, “unalterable.” The very outmoded, archaic features of the program transformed it from an object of discussion to one of veneration. Moreover, its purpose was not to answer questions or define aims but to attract attention.

Clarification would mean only division, Hitler declared. Faith was all. Once he had insisted on the identity of Führer and idea, the principle of the infallible, immutable Führer was equally established. One of his adherents put it in a nutshell: “Our program can be expressed in two words: ‘Adolf Hitler.' ”

The Bamberg meeting and the concomitant humiliation of Gregor Strasser marked the beginning of the end for leftist National Socialism. In spite of the clamorous publicity stirred up at the time, especially by Otto Strasser, the Nazi Left henceforth could only be a troublesome deviation, no longer an effective political alternative. From the time of the meeting, the NSDAP was increasingly molded into a regimented leader-directed party. Thereafter, and until the end, there were no longer any battles over principles, no longer any ideological disputes; what remained was only the struggle for office and favoritism. “Our movement has tremendous powers of assimilation,” Hitler stated shortly afterward. Along with this, National Socialism no longer tried to rival the system of the democratic republic by presenting its own plan for a social order. Rather than an idea, it opposed to the republic a committed, disciplined, militant association whose members basked obtusely in the Führer's charisma. Theirs was the “primitive force of one-sidedness” that “arouses such horror precisely in people of the better class,” that “male fist which,” as Hitler put it in one of his weirder mixed metaphors, “knows that a toxin can only be smashed by an antitoxin.... The harder head must decide, the greatest resolution and the greater idealism.” Elsewhere he assured the party members: “Such a struggle is not waged with ‘intellectual' weapons, but with fanaticism.”

It was this ruthlessly instrumental character of the party in the hands of a seemingly unchallenged leader that soon distinguished the National Socialist Party from all other political parties and militant movements. Its discipline surpassed that of the Communists, in whose obedient cadres elements of deviation, skepticism, and intellectual resistance were continually cropping up. There were no such problems within the NSDAP; the abject way in which the anti-Hitler opposition had caved in seemed to inspire a passion for conformity. Many of Strasser's followers now made it their ambition to convert the “movement into a handy, flawlessly functioning tool in the Führer's hand.” Henceforth Hitler literally cracked his whip over even the highest-ranking members of the party leadership, insisting on his supremacy. The man to be hailed as “prototype of a good National Socialist,” he declared, is one who “would let himself be killed for his Führer at any time.” According to the bylaws the general membership meetings had to elect Hitler first chairman of the party; but from now on the motion to this effect would be treated as a humorous formality. As Göring later declared, alongside of Hitler's overwhelming authority “none of us counts more than the stones on which we are standing.”
³¹

Contrary to his usual inclination to exult over any triumphs, Hitler followed up his victory at Bamberg with conciliatory personal gestures. When Gregor Strasser was injured in an auto accident, Hitler appeared at his bedside “with a gigantic bouquet of flowers” and was, according to a letter of the patient himself, “very nice.” He used the same approach with Goebbels, who had the worst reputation at Munich party headquarters as spokeman for the Strasser clique. Goebbels found himself suddenly being wooed. He was asked to be the principal speaker at a meeting in the Munich Biirgerbrau, and at the end of his speech Hitler embraced him with tears in his eyes. “He is embarrassingly good to us,” Goebbels noted, deeply moved. At the same time, however, Hitler began to create the party machinery that would safeguard his newly acquired authority.

A general membership meeting held in Munich on May 22, 1926, established new bylaws for the NSDAP that were undisguisedly tailored to Hitler's personal needs. The National Socialist German Workers' Club in Munich was to be the cornerstone of the party; its directors also constituted the directorate of the party throughout Germany. The first chairman would still be elected—that was required by the laws regulating associations—but the electoral college for the entire party was to consist of the few thousand members of the Munich
Ortsgruppe
(“local group”). Thus the rest of the party was completely disenfranchised. Moreover, the Munich group alone had the right to demand an accounting of the first chairman—and the procedure for doing so was extremely complicated. In practice, therefore, Hitler's total control over the party was assured. There would be no majority decisions binding on him. Hereafter, in fact, even the gauleiters would not be elected by local party meetings, and the same was true of the chairmen of committees. Thus factions could not form, not even powerless ones.

In order to bolster this system even further, an investigation and mediation committee (USCHLA) was created, a kind of party tribunal whose sole importance lay in its right to expel individuals or even entire local groups from the NSDAP. Its first chairman, former Lieutenant General Heinemann, misunderstood the purpose of the committee. He thought it was meant to be an instrument for fighting corruption and immorality within the party. Hitler thereupon replaced him by the more docile Major Walter Buch, and as associate magistrates appointed his obedient Ulrich Graf and a young lawyer named Hans Frank.

In early July, six weeks later, Hitler celebrated his victory at a party rally in Weimar, where the new trend was clearly manifest. All critical—or, as Hitler contemptuously phrased it, “ingenious”—notions, all “half-baked and vague ideas” were repressed. The practice that later became standard for party rallies was applied here for the first time: only those motions were admitted which “have received the signature of the First Chairman.” Instead of a wrangling party involved in differences over programs, the public image was to be that of “perfectly welded and consolidated leadership.” In his “Fundamental Directives” Hitler ruled that the chairmen of the various special sessions were “to feel themselves leaders and not executive organs of the results of voting.” In general, there was no voting, and Hitler wanted “endless discussions smothered.” For they led people to think that political questions “can be solved by people sitting on their bottoms at a club meeting.” Finally, strict bounds were set for speaking time in plenary sessions “so that the whole program cannot be wrecked by a single individual.”